Archive for research
11 November, 2009 at 9:23 am
· Filed under design, game design, life, quote, research ·Tagged rewards
We can easily become slaves to novelty, especially in the form of shiny technological toys that push novelty to us every hour of the day.
“…The brain is built to ignore the old and focus on the new….
Novelty is probably one of the most powerful signals to determine what we pay attention to in the world.”
“Researchers have found that novelty causes a number of brain systems to become activated, and foremost among these is the dopamine system…
…research shows that dopamine is more like the "gimme more" neurotransmitter.”
“…the role of dopamine is not in the pleasure that one may get from the drug, but in establishing the craving that keeps one coming back for more…
When dopamine is released, it is a signal to the brain that is it now time to start learning what is going on.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-poldrack/multitasking-the-brain-se_b_334674.html
http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/multitasking-is-the-brain-seeking-novelty/
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18 September, 2009 at 12:07 pm
· Filed under life, research ·Tagged narcissism
“I” is the most popular word at the start of a tweet, and is the 2nd most popular word used on Twitter.
Only ~10% of tweets contain a question
This compares to general advice on good blogging, which recommends that readers prefer less “I”, and the human brain response well, and better remembers intriguing questions.
Are we becoming more narcissistic?
Source Oxford English Corpus
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25 August, 2009 at 7:51 pm
· Filed under life, quote, research
Is multitasking causing a change in people’s capabilities? By multitasking, do you make yourself less capable… of multitasking, and anything else that requires concentration, flow or focus.
"The shocking discovery of this research is that [high multitaskers] are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multitasking," Professor Nass said.
"The irony here is that when you ask the low multitaskers, they all think they’re much worse at multitasking and the high multitaskers think they’re gifted at it."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8219212.stm
“But at the very least, he said, multitaskers should be told that they are bad at multitasking.”
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14 August, 2009 at 3:20 pm
· Filed under quote, research
“…children ages 11-14. The young people who used their phones more often- with the setting that completed words automatically (predictive texting), completed tests quicker, but with a larger number of mistakes.
…results showed predictive texting may be teaching children to act fast, while placing less emphasis on specificity and accuracy.”
http://www.psfk.com/2009/08/kids-who-text-frequently-work-faster-sloppier.html
And this behaviour transfers in to other areas of life.
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12 August, 2009 at 9:04 pm
· Filed under publishing, quote, research
- Choose a project that you can complete – create something that you can do quickly
- Don’t get caught up in engine building or grand designs
- You don’t always need to innovate
- Work hard, but find an idea that’s fun to work hard on
- Don’t expect your game to be a hit, and move on if it doesn’t fly
- It’s easier to keep the momentum on an existing success than to create a new one
- There is no magic formula to making a successful game – pay attention to your app and think about ways to incrementally improve your game and approach
- You need to be noticed
- Work the community – it’s your community, you work it
- Implementing user requests go a long way – listen and respond
http://www.industrygamers.com/galleries/industry-insights-10-tips-to-succeed-on-iphone/
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11 August, 2009 at 8:26 pm
· Filed under life, quote, research
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11 August, 2009 at 7:44 pm
· Filed under quote, research
AdMob data on “How do iPhone users discover apps?”
62% search for a specific type of app (not clear if this is by name or type/genre)
60% browse through top ranked apps
46% word of mouth recommendation
20% see an ad while using another app
19% press/news or blog
10% a brand introduces an app and reaches out to me
13% other
Suggesting that a remarkable quality, enabling word of mouth matters.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_do_iphone_users_find_new_apps.php
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10 August, 2009 at 8:48 am
· Filed under game design, quote, research
“…neuroscientists have discovered that a brain centre involved in sensing emotion and fear called the amygdala kicks into action when volunteers listen to scary music with eyes closed.
“A lot of time we do like to close our eyes when we listen to music, we feel like this is a more powerful experience,” says Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, who led the new brain imaging study.
Shutting your eyes heightens people’s emotional responses to the outside world…”
via http://derrenbrownart.com/blog/2009/08/scary-music-spookier-eyes-shut/
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28 July, 2009 at 9:19 pm
· Filed under game design, quote, research ·Tagged rewards
“Youngsters tend to live for the moment whilst older folks are more concerned about their futures.”
“A key difference emerged between participants who were aged thirteen and younger versus those aged sixteen and older, with the older group being more future oriented. There were no age-related differences among participants aged thirteen or less, or among participants aged sixteen or more, whilst fourteen and fifteen-year-olds were mixed…”
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/06/our-changing-attitudes-to-time.html
The younger age group tends to favour immediate reward, while the mid-adolescent & older age groups tend to value immediate rewards less.
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21 April, 2009 at 9:15 pm
· Filed under life, research
Yes. Your sub conscious gut listens to everything you hear, and it takes most things at face value. Your brain has evolved to form snap judgements, using a rule of ‘appearance equals reality’ to speed up reaction times. Very useful when making life or death decisions about predators stalking you through the savannah grasses.
Your inner voice or ego chatterbox, twitters away full of undermining self criticism. Yet your sub conscious gut listens… and believes it just like any other input. (Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway® by Susan Jeffers)
While your sub conscious believes what it hears, your conscious mind will often try to temper and modify your gut’s opinions.
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16 April, 2009 at 10:17 pm
· Filed under design, game design, research ·Tagged simplicity
So much time and energy goes in to designing, implementing, testing and releasing software features that only a minority of people use.
“Only 20% of a mobile phone’s features are used regularly; up to a quarter remain completely undiscovered”
from a study by WDSGlobal
1 billion apps downloaded from the App Store, yet most go used or unexplored. Our appetite is there, and for whatever reason our hunger fades quickly.
“Pinch Media drawing on iPhone analytics data highlights that (only) ~20% of user’s ever return to use an application the day after it is installed. There are many ways to interpret this data: the harshest being that ~80% of user’s are so unimpressed with their application that they never return to it.”
http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2009/04/1000000000-apps-pfft.html
In some cases breadth of function is important, although no excuse for complexity.
“A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.”
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Is featuritis driven by fear?
“Fear of being perceived as having fewer features than your competitors. Fear that you won’t be viewed as complete. Fear that people are making purchase decisions off of a checklist, and that he who has the most features wins (or at the least, that he who has the fewest features definitely loses). Fear of losing key clients who say, "If you don’t add THIS… I’ll have to go elsewhere."
Be brave. And besides, continuing to pile on new features eventually leads to an endless downhill slide toward poor usability and maintenance. A negative spiral of incremental improvements. Fighting and clawing for market share by competing solely on features is an unhealthy, unsustainable, and unfun way to live.
Be the "I Rule" product, not the "This thing I bought does everything, but I suck!" product.”
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/featuritis_vs_t.html
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1 October, 2008 at 9:41 pm
· Filed under game design, research
Peter Shafer, of Harris Interactive presented some interesting findings. In a survey of 1300 kids aged 8-18:
- Ease of use is important when it comes to toys, especially among girls
- Kids see the learning value in toys, but it’s not their primary objective
- They want a variety of experiences from one product
- Kids are very brand and platform aware. It’s not specific games for them, but rather Nintendo or Wii.
Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek psych professor, Temple University and author of Einstein Never Used Flashcards, told the industry: “Please guys, take brain growth off the packaging. Bilingualism from a mobile? No, that doesn’t happen”
Parent-child interaction is key to play, several experts said. Deborah Linebarger of the University of Pennsylvania recommends that being built into products.
http://www.ypulse.com/ypulse-guest-post-report-from-the-sandbox-summit/
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20 September, 2008 at 3:01 pm
· Filed under quote, research ·Tagged play
“Play,” incidentally, is a mysterious activity children engage in when not compelled to spend every hour under adult supervision, taking soccer or piano lessons or practicing vocabulary words with computerized flashcards.
All in all, “going out to play” worked out well for kids. As the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg testified to Congress in 2006, “Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles. … Play helps children develop new competencies … and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges.” But here’s the catch: Those benefits aren’t realized when some helpful adult is hovering over kids the whole time.
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25 July, 2008 at 9:23 pm
· Filed under game design, quote, research
This theory is a four-stage ladder up which Piaget thought children climbed as they gathered knowledge about the world:
- Sensorimotor (birth to 18-24 months): infants are aware only of their sensations, fascinated by all the strange new experiences their bodies are having. They are like little scientists exploring the world by shouting at, listening to, banging and tasting everything.
- Pre-operational (18-24 months to 7 years): during this stage children can process images, words and concepts but they can’t do anything with them, they can’t yet operate on them. It’s like they’ve acquired the tools of thought, but don’t yet know how to use them. E.g. in maths they can’t understand that 2 x 3 is the same as 3 x 2.
- Concrete operations (7 to 12 years): at this stage children gain the ability to manipulate symbols and objects, but only if they are concrete – abstract operations are still a challenge.
- Formal operations (12 and up): from here on children are able to think in abstract terms about the world. Now they can understand concepts such as the future, values and justice. From around this age children start thinking like adults.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/07/jean-piagets-four-stage-theory-how.php
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12 June, 2008 at 10:38 pm
· Filed under life, quote, research
1. Name-calling
“…use of words to connect a person or idea to a negative concept. The aim is to make a person reject something without examining the evidence because of the negative associations attached to it.”
2. Attractive Generalities
“The opposite of name-calling, this involves the use of highly valued concepts and beliefs which attract general approval and acclaim. These are vague, emotionally attractive words like ‘freedom‘, ‘honor‘ and ‘love‘.”
3. Transfer
“…to carry over the authority and approval of something you respect and revere to something the propagandist would have you accept. One does this by projecting the qualities of an entity, person or symbol to another through visual or mental association.”
4. Testimonial
“…leverage the experience, authority and respect of a person and use it to endorse a product or cause.”
5. Plain Folks
“…propagandist positions him or herself as an average person just like the target audience, thereby demonstrating the ability to empathize and understand the concerns/feelings of the masses.”
6. Card Stacking
“…manipulating audience perceptions by emphasizing one side of an argument which reinforces your position … compare and contrast the best possible scenarios with the worse examples.”
7. Bandwagon
“…to suggest that ’since everyone is doing it, you should too’.”
http://www.doshdosh.com/the-art-of-propaganda-seven-common-techniques/
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29 May, 2008 at 10:27 pm
· Filed under quote, research
“Playing four 15-minute sessions of board games such as snakes and ladders can improve a child’s mathematical abilities significantly, according to a study of four and five-year-olds. And the improvement in numerical tests is still measurable nine weeks later.”
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2267895,00.html
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23 April, 2008 at 9:06 pm
· Filed under game design, quote, research
“…the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.”
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
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27 February, 2008 at 9:21 pm
· Filed under design, life, research
Research suggests that a bias towards higher priced goods may have something to do with the way that the brain links price with pleasure, and leads people to make assumptions about quality. NYT.
Professor Rangel, Caltech, said that there were reasons to suspect that price tag bias occurs in many contexts. Given the human love affair with high priced luxury goods, and their association with status and power, it’s possible that we’ve come to experience a cerebral shiver of delight in response to things that promise cachet.
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16 February, 2008 at 9:35 am
· Filed under design, game design, project management, research
The Goldilocks Rule. Don’t give people too little or too much.
Give them just the right amount for what you want them to achieve or experience.
Rule of Four. Don’t expect the audience to keep in mind more than four groups on a slide. Car license plates and telephone numbers are as long as they are because of how much information we can easily store in our short-term memories: on average about four groups.
Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer Rule. What’s different stands out, be it a red nose, a large graphic, or words in bold.
Powerpoint for Martians?
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30 January, 2008 at 2:27 pm
· Filed under life, project management, research
Similar to the ‘tappers and listeners’ example quoted in Made to Stick. Research from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests;
You have only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. And the sender estimates that 80% of the time the recipient will correctly gauge the tone of the message.
In reality, the recipient correctly gauges the tone only 50% of the time.
The difference between the sender and the receiver’s understanding is a very dangerous gap to leave open to chance…
common emoticons
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